Development of a chained barrel-shaped ELSA for a pneumatic corset aim to prevent a muscle weakening

Recent years, height of percentage of the person who has subjective symptom of such lower back pain is presented as a problem in aging society. Brace therapy is one of the methods of treatment for lower back pain. However, the method of treatment has possibility to cause muscle deterioration by wearing invariably for a corset. On the other hand, it is difficult for such senior citizens and handicapped person to do removable the corset. Therefore, this paper proposed development of the corset that built pneumatic soft actuators and has on/off switching function in order to solve the problem. So we manufactured the corset and the actuators to the corset. And we instituted the EMG experiment to show the performance evaluation of the corset. We found the problem about the responsiveness and we solved the problem by improving a new structure of the actuator. This structure was able to raise the responsiveness.